About

The MediaClimate project looks into global climate change coverage in appr. twenty countries. It sets out to analyze climate change in journalism both (1) as a manifestation of the rapidly changing context wherein contemporary journalism takes place and develops and (2) as an illustration of the political re-formation of the issue of climate change in the post-Copenhagen (COP15) era.

Well documented technological, political, economic and cultural changes during the past two decades have paved way to the emergence of networked journalism functioning in an open environment. From this perspective, the project explores how the traditional tasks of professional journalism such as transmission of knowledge, crafting of narratives and shared interpretative frames, facilitating public discourse and functioning as a resource for public action, are re-articulated in the context of contemporary climate change coverage.

The political re-formation of climate change is situated in the aftermath of the climate hype that preceded the Copenhagen climate summit (2009) and the disappointment that followed. Since then, global attention to the issue has decreased and climate policy-making process has stagnated and fragmented. However, through the publication of the last IPCC assessment reports (AR5, 2013,2014) and through more vociferous calls for climate justice it is somewhat likely that a new intensification of the debate will follow. The project has analyzed media coverage of a number of COPs (see publications), including Paris 2015 (COP21), and the coverage of IPCC AR5 (see publications). Future plans include organizing joint conferences and study the forthcoming phase of climate politics as a process, including a wide range of national and transnational experiences .